What It Was Like to Write on George Lucas’ Unproduced Star Wars Show

March 2025 has turned into the unofficial Talk About Star Wars Underworld Month. Days after Star Wars producer Rick McCallum discussed the mythical, unproduced show, Battlestar Galactica, Star Trek, and For All Mankind writer/producer Ronald D. Moore spoke about what it was like to be one of the show’s writers.

Appearing on The Sackhoff Show (hosted by Bo-Katan herself, Katee Sackhoff), Moore talked about being called by George Lucas to write on what Lucas thought a live-action Star Wars show could be. Here’s the clip.

“Galactica was winding down. Caprica was starting right around that period. I got a call that George Lucas wants to meet with [me] about a possible series,” Moore said. “So I meet with George … and producer Rick McCallum, and at that point George wanted to do a live-action Star Wars TV series … What he wanted to do is he wanted to gather a group of writers together, kind of an international group of writers. So I was one of the Americans and there were some from the UK and from Australia [and] New Zealand, and he would bring us together up at Skywalker Ranch for like a long weekend … We would go for these long weekends, or a week or something, at a time with George in a conference room at Skywalker Ranch and break these stories. Then we would go off for like another six weeks out by ourselves, write the scripts, then regather, talk about notes, do another group of scripts.”

“This went on for like a year or two or something,” Moore continued. “We would just gather, break up, gather, break and … we wrote something like, I think, 48 or 50 episodes … It’s definitely in the 40s … And when we got to that point, George said, ‘Okay, that’s enough.’ And he’s then he wanted to just take those scripts and he was just gonna go shoot them on his dime … In George’s mind, it was, ‘Once I’ve produced it, I’m just gonna then take it to a network and go ‘Take it or leave it. This is what it is. I don’t care what your notes are, I don’t care what your thoughts are, it’s done. Do you want it?’”

This, however, is where McCallum’s part of the story came in. Lucas’ idea was a great idea in theory but the show was just so prohibitively expensive, Lucas never got around to making it. Then, of course, he sold Lucasfilm, and Star Wars, to Disney, and that was that.

Still, Moore says he personally wrote two of the scripts and treasures the experience, especially getting to argue about Star Wars with the creator himself. “At a certain point, you get over your awe and now you’re just in a writer’s room and he’s telling you something about Darth Vader that doesn’t make sense,” Moore said, before breaking into a spot-on Lucas impression. “You’re just like ‘Oh my God, what am I doing? Where am I?’ You just kind of forget and now you’re just at story conference having an argument.”

Watch the full clip above and thanks to Jedi News for the heads up.

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